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Tech - itis?
Disengaging from "clients who didn’t suit .... new direction" is more representative of failure by the one doing the disengaging than the client, regardless of the tech.
Good to hear
At last, a bit of honesty and practical reality amongst the cloud and excellence hype. It's refreshing to hear that we're all human.
I attended the Cloud Conference this year and unfortunately that 'reality' was a little lacking, both from the speakers (only to be expected) and the panel Q&A''s. I'm hoping that once the hype has settled down a bit then we'll go back to more balanced articles like this one.
Finally
I posted about this a few months ago, "the emperors new clothes" and everyone jumped down my throat and said I was living in the past etc.This part in particular "I take them out for a coffee, get the receipt and then take a snap of it and show them how I enter it into my system. That gets them interested.” makes me shudder as this is the reason that clients think they can do their own bookkeeping. I also posted a few days ago about how clients rarely get their bookkeeping right, cloud software has made this worse because more clients think they can do their own accounts but IMO this had made life more difficult for practices because a) their accounts are wrong b) it would be easier to have prepared the accounts from scratch rather than fixing all the mistakes c) clients don't want to pay for bookkeeping.
Agree with Tickers ...
... this is the first rational and thought out Cloud post I have seen, rather than the usual tub thumping best thing since sliced bread stuff we normally get fed!
This is what I have been saying:
But it wasn’t what his clients actually wanted. “We believed that the tech was that great that everyone should just be able to pick it up and just do it,” he explained. “And they can’t, because they’re not bookkeepers, they’re not accountants and, most of the time, it’s not what they want to be spending their time doing.”
So Smart Accountancy reinstated their bookkeeping service and many clients make use of it. “We created the issue for ourselves, believing that clients could simply do what a bookkeeper or an accountant could do.”
But, he reiterated, the tech isn’t what this is about, the tech are just your tools.
Horses for courses
Great article, and as others say, it's great to see a balanced view.
Surely the point is that Smart Accountancy have chosen a clear direction for the firm (no bad thing), understood what they would like to achieve in and from their client base (again no bad thing), worked on the basis that they believed what they were doing was in the best interests of clients (ditto), and admitted that they had to adjust and amend the course when they got some client feedback (which should have been done first, by their own admission).
Retention levels bares out the client ultimate reaction.
"The tech may have changed, but the central axiom of client service hasn’t,"
Do the right thing by your clients, and by your own ambitions for your firm. I can't seen the death of bookkeeping looming, but the evolution of service continues.